The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov

I have endeavoured to form a coherent picture of what I saw of my half-brother in those childhood days of mine, between say 1910 (my first year of consciousness) and 1919 (the year he left for England). But the task eludes me. Sebastian's image does not appear as part of my boyhood, thus subject to endless selection and development, nor does it appear as a succession of familiar visions, but it comes to me in a few bright patches, as if he were not a constant member of our family, but some erratic visitor passing across a lighted room and then for a long interval fading into the night.

Sebastian Knight, the critically acclaimed but aloof writer, has died. His brother, the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, dreams of writing a biography of Sebastian, one that will counterbalance a recently published hatchet job by his former agent full of falsehoods and misinterpretations. The problem is that the two brothers have never been close; they are only half-brothers, sharing the same father--killed in a duel defending his first wife, Sebastian's mother, while married to the second--and as they grew up they rarely saw each other. The narrator becomes especially fixated on recovering a blank period of Sebastian's life while he was at a Swiss sanitarium, where he seems to have met a mysterious woman whose identity the narrator struggles to reveal.

Sebastian Knight is awfully straightforward for a Nabokov novel. Seeing that Sebastian's spurned lover is named Clare Bishop, I considered for a second the possibility that we're supposed to read the whole novel as a kind of allegory for a game of chess: pawn to queen four, and all that. But I think, in the end, it's only a little joke, the kind of situational rhyming that Nabokov loved so much. Rather, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight struck me as a surprisingly realistic attempt at dealing with the modernist themes of writing and fashioning that made up so much of Nabokov's career. That is to say that the problem that confronts the narrator, V.--whether a true life can be cobbled together out of written words, or if writing itself is actually primarily and by its nature made up of gaps, misprisions--is one that confronted Nabokov, too, but it seems to confront him here less than it does his narrator.

It must be observed that this was Nabokov's first book written originally in English. The confidence of his style is already here, fully formed; that he could become one of the 20th century's leading stylists in two different languages is a marvel so fully explored it hardly seems worth mentioning. But it interested me that Nabokov made his writer-protagonist a native Russian who becomes an English language writer. Sebastian's novels sound like Nabokov's novels, though I think there are moments where Nabokov cheekily has V. (Vladimir?) outshine the passages quoted from Sebastian. Sebastian's letters were burned after his death (shades here of Nabokov's own unheeded demand that his unfinished novel be burned), so V. must turn to the novels for an indication of Sebastian's experiences and feelings. He claims that Sebastian had an uncanny ability to write his own feelings into his characters, even critically: "The light of personal truth is hard to perceive in the shimmer of an imaginary nature, but what is still harder to understand is the amazing fact that a man writing of things which he really felt at the time of writing, could have had the power to create simultaneously--and out of the very things which distressed his mind--a fictitious and faintly absurd character." Is this Nabokov writing about Nabokov writing about Nabokov?

V. eventually identifies a woman named Helene as Sebastian's likely lover. Calling on her, he finds her out, but her friend, Nina Lecerf, promises to arrange an audience between them, and in the meantime spills all she knows about the stormy relationship between Sebastian and Helene. It's only later, in the wake of his own confused attraction to Nina, that V. realizes that Nina really is Helene; everything she has been divulging has been from behind the safer veil of another identity. It's possible, the ending of the book suggests, that V. really "is" Sebastian in the same way that Nina really is Helene. Although The Real Life of Sebastian Knight isn't the most accomplished of Nabokov's books, Nina is one of the small characters and moments I'll remember, like the kindly German private eye who refuses payment, or the moment when, having rushed to his brother's sickbed, he accidentally spends the night outside the wrong man's room, Sebastian having died the day before. Perhaps he is Sebastian, too, this man, Nabokov suggests: "any soul may be yours," V. writes, "if you find it and follow its undulations."